Arthur Daigle's Blog - Posts Tagged "debt"
Unhinged University
Few on the world of Other Place can master the art of magic, even though the world is known for spell casters. Partly this is because not all people have the necessary genius, and even fewer have the money to afford training. Of those with the prerequisite cash and intelligence, most are badly needed elsewhere doing important jobs, like being engineers, scholars, accountant, doctors and court officials. But for the few, the brilliant, the outrageously rich who aren’t otherwise too busy, magic is a possibility.
Aspiring wizards seek out masters to apprentice themselves to, but this leads to another problem. Most wizards have better things to do with their time than take on students. It doesn’t help that wizards can be highly selective about which student they’ll take even when the money is there. Masters might accept students only from specific races or nationalities. Some wizards are quite frankly evil and misuse/abuse potential students for reasons that start at petty and get worse from there.
This makes learning magic hard even for those special few. Most aspiring wizards give up, but for the truly determined and desperate, there’s Unhinged University.
Unhinged University
Unhinged University was founded by a small group of outlaw wizards. They weren’t evil, nor did their desire to rule the world for good reasons or bad ones. No, these wizards were swimming in debt, owing outrageous sums to lenders of questionable ethics, the kind that sends a man to the bottom of the ocean if he doesn’t pay. Powerful as they are, wizards can die, and bankers have the money to hire the best assassins to do the job. The wizards banded together for mutual protection and fled to an uninhabited wilderness. Here they built a few stone towers using powerful earth magic and settled down.
Their lives may have ended in obscurity and grinding poverty, except peasant farmers saw the towers and correctly guessed wizards were behind their sudden appearance. The farmers begged the wizards to kill monsters that were devastating their sheep herds, and they offered a small reward. None of the wizards wanted to help, but they needed the money and killed the monsters.
That fateful moment truly screwed them all. Word got out that a colony of wizards had appeared and was available for hire. Countless desperate and frightened people braved the wilderness to seek their aid, and a few youths arrived to ask for training. Then the wizards’ creditors came with assassins who specialized in killing wizards. It looked like the wizards were going to die, but their creditors saw a chance to get their money back. They agreed not to harm the wizards if they started making payments, using funds from helping people and training students to cover the bill. Facing imminent death from trained assassins, the wizards reluctantly agreed.
The university has stood for over two hundred years, so long that neighboring kingdoms have annexed territory right up to the university lawn. No kingdom has ever tried to annex the university itself, for the simple reason they don’t want to. Over the years, Unhinged University has burned down, blown up, vanished into thin air and even sunken into the ground. As long as no kingdom owns the land, and thus the university, their kings don’t get stuck with the bill. Each time Unhinged University has fallen, the university has been rebuilt under threat of the original creditors, still determined to get their money back. Reconstruction only adds to the debt the university began under and is still paying off.
Today Unhinged University has twenty wizards and a hundred apprentices. None of them are that impressive, but tenacity and overwhelming numbers often succeeds where skill and training fails. University staff produce and sell a large number of potions and single use magic items. The quality of these goods is questionable, but customers keep coming because cheap magic is better than no magic. University staff also copies and sells books and scrolls, usually assigning the work to apprentices. Typographical errors are said to be significant, and mistakes can be both glaring and potentially disastrous.
The university graduates dozens of wizards per year. Tuition is lower than most schools or independent wizards charge, and the education students receive is also lower. Graduates are on average less competent, worse trained and more morally questionable than traditionally trained wizards. These facts are widely known, yet it surprisingly doesn’t affect graduating students much. The demand for wizards, even bad ones, is so high that these subpar wizards are hired within weeks of leaving the university. Few of them ever grow to be mighty in their own right, and other wizards sneer at them, but most graduates get what they wanted.
Unlike many wizards, the staff at Unhinged University isn’t picky about who their buyers are, and they are equally willing to accept students from any race, gender, ethnicity or nationality. All are welcome provided they have enough money. This isn’t due to enlightened attitudes, but because the university can’t afford to turn down paying customers.
That last fact can be a problem. Plenty of questionable individuals have come to Unhinged University for training in magic or to buy minor magic items. University staff is equally willing to help these people as they are those with functioning moral compasses. This willingness to work with undesirable people, as well as the university’s history of being accidentally destroyed every few decades, earned it the name Unhinged University. Staff members have tried to change the name, but every time they come up with a new title no one uses it.
Despised and needed in equal measures, Unhinged University is open to all who can afford them. Villains and heroes both can find aid within its walls, often at the same time, for university staff neither favors no refuses any who come. Indeed, some research can only be conducted here, for the university is officially part of no kingdom, and thus is not beholden to laws either good or bad that prevent certain questionable experiments. In truth there are only two laws at Unhinged University: pay in cash, and all sales are final.
Aspiring wizards seek out masters to apprentice themselves to, but this leads to another problem. Most wizards have better things to do with their time than take on students. It doesn’t help that wizards can be highly selective about which student they’ll take even when the money is there. Masters might accept students only from specific races or nationalities. Some wizards are quite frankly evil and misuse/abuse potential students for reasons that start at petty and get worse from there.
This makes learning magic hard even for those special few. Most aspiring wizards give up, but for the truly determined and desperate, there’s Unhinged University.
Unhinged University
Unhinged University was founded by a small group of outlaw wizards. They weren’t evil, nor did their desire to rule the world for good reasons or bad ones. No, these wizards were swimming in debt, owing outrageous sums to lenders of questionable ethics, the kind that sends a man to the bottom of the ocean if he doesn’t pay. Powerful as they are, wizards can die, and bankers have the money to hire the best assassins to do the job. The wizards banded together for mutual protection and fled to an uninhabited wilderness. Here they built a few stone towers using powerful earth magic and settled down.
Their lives may have ended in obscurity and grinding poverty, except peasant farmers saw the towers and correctly guessed wizards were behind their sudden appearance. The farmers begged the wizards to kill monsters that were devastating their sheep herds, and they offered a small reward. None of the wizards wanted to help, but they needed the money and killed the monsters.
That fateful moment truly screwed them all. Word got out that a colony of wizards had appeared and was available for hire. Countless desperate and frightened people braved the wilderness to seek their aid, and a few youths arrived to ask for training. Then the wizards’ creditors came with assassins who specialized in killing wizards. It looked like the wizards were going to die, but their creditors saw a chance to get their money back. They agreed not to harm the wizards if they started making payments, using funds from helping people and training students to cover the bill. Facing imminent death from trained assassins, the wizards reluctantly agreed.
The university has stood for over two hundred years, so long that neighboring kingdoms have annexed territory right up to the university lawn. No kingdom has ever tried to annex the university itself, for the simple reason they don’t want to. Over the years, Unhinged University has burned down, blown up, vanished into thin air and even sunken into the ground. As long as no kingdom owns the land, and thus the university, their kings don’t get stuck with the bill. Each time Unhinged University has fallen, the university has been rebuilt under threat of the original creditors, still determined to get their money back. Reconstruction only adds to the debt the university began under and is still paying off.
Today Unhinged University has twenty wizards and a hundred apprentices. None of them are that impressive, but tenacity and overwhelming numbers often succeeds where skill and training fails. University staff produce and sell a large number of potions and single use magic items. The quality of these goods is questionable, but customers keep coming because cheap magic is better than no magic. University staff also copies and sells books and scrolls, usually assigning the work to apprentices. Typographical errors are said to be significant, and mistakes can be both glaring and potentially disastrous.
The university graduates dozens of wizards per year. Tuition is lower than most schools or independent wizards charge, and the education students receive is also lower. Graduates are on average less competent, worse trained and more morally questionable than traditionally trained wizards. These facts are widely known, yet it surprisingly doesn’t affect graduating students much. The demand for wizards, even bad ones, is so high that these subpar wizards are hired within weeks of leaving the university. Few of them ever grow to be mighty in their own right, and other wizards sneer at them, but most graduates get what they wanted.
Unlike many wizards, the staff at Unhinged University isn’t picky about who their buyers are, and they are equally willing to accept students from any race, gender, ethnicity or nationality. All are welcome provided they have enough money. This isn’t due to enlightened attitudes, but because the university can’t afford to turn down paying customers.
That last fact can be a problem. Plenty of questionable individuals have come to Unhinged University for training in magic or to buy minor magic items. University staff is equally willing to help these people as they are those with functioning moral compasses. This willingness to work with undesirable people, as well as the university’s history of being accidentally destroyed every few decades, earned it the name Unhinged University. Staff members have tried to change the name, but every time they come up with a new title no one uses it.
Despised and needed in equal measures, Unhinged University is open to all who can afford them. Villains and heroes both can find aid within its walls, often at the same time, for university staff neither favors no refuses any who come. Indeed, some research can only be conducted here, for the university is officially part of no kingdom, and thus is not beholden to laws either good or bad that prevent certain questionable experiments. In truth there are only two laws at Unhinged University: pay in cash, and all sales are final.
